Thanks to the mixed blessings of Ancestry.com, it was only in the last year or so that I found out my paternal ancestral line runs not only through Poland (which I already knew), but Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the rest of the Baltic states — in other words, all the places now in the path of Putin’s Russian invasion.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s not as if I’ve ever been to those places, and all my relatives on that side are gone. But still, I’m surprised that I have actual emotions about these places. Maybe there’s something to this whole epigenetics thing.
